Brush Art Gallery to Feature ‘Voice Remainders’

Richard (Wes) Kline, associate professor of art & art history

Richard (Wes) Kline, associate professor of art & art history

St. Lawrence University’s Richard F. Brush Art Gallery will feature Voice Remainders, an exhibition of works by Wes Kline, assistant professor of art and art history.

The exhibition will open on Wednesday, Aug. 20, and run through Saturday, Oct. 4 in the gallery. Kline will present a public lecture at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 23, in room 123 of the Griffiths Arts Center.

Loosely related works, Kline explains, use sound, video and photography to address the image of the voice, even as digital technologies have transformed speech and its corresponding presence into a kind of participatory algorithm.

“Our experience of images has changed dramatically as technology has shifted both the location and the production of the image,” he says. “One encounters images on a search engine not as grounded documentary sites, but rather as a kind of floating world leading from one point to another. Images on smartphones create bubbles of presence that drift from one device to another. ‘Selfies' stand in for us in other locations. Utilizing this understanding of image, my work examines and looks to create what the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls 'inspired spatial communities' that are united, however fleetingly, by purposeful engagement with vectors of language, sound and image.”

The exhibition is supported by a faculty research grant from St. Lawrence University. For more information, visit www.stlawu.edu/gallery.